REVEALED: BLIND SPOT OF UK BUSINESSES AND CHARITIES

New research has revealed that only half of UK businesses and charities have a website.

Despite the World Wide Web hitting its 25th birthday earlier this year, almost a third of businesses and charities polled said they felt having an online presence wasn’t relevant to their organisation.

The research, commissioned by Lloyds Banking Group, shows that UK industry has a ‘digital blindspot’ when it comes to embracing the benefits of the web. With so many businesses admitting to not having the means to deal with customers and suppliers online, it’s thought that a large part of the UK’s economy could be jeopardising their potential for future growth.

Lloyds Bank is encouraging businesses and charities to embrace digital and online and have thrown their weight behind Go ON UK, a charity that tries to support businesses and charities to make the leap online.

Baroness Lane-Fox is chair of Go ON UK and she said the new research, known as the UK Digital Business Index, is a great step forward, ‘The UK does actually lead the way in some of the digital indicators.

‘Now the internet economy is about 8% of our total GDP, we have the highest number of online shoppers as a percentage of GDP in the world but we’ve never really had a handle before on what the wider business world looks like in the UK and I think it’s easy to think that because we are far ahead in some aspects that the whole country is far ahead’.

Jen Tippin, Managing Director of Retail Business Banking at Lloyds Bank pointed out that there are lots of different reasons why businesses may not be digitally active, ‘Some of the things that businesses are telling us are that they struggle to find the time to get digitally active, in some cases they don’t necessarily have the right skills or the right people, or they are struggling to find the investment to be able to get online’.

With the UKs economy finally beginning to move back towards growth, the speed of that growth could be positively affected if more businesses choose to embrace the digital economy.